How to Play Easy Chord Shapes Up The Neck Lesson on JustinGuitar

Dear Justin, I do love your videos. @ 3:59 you mention a movable C chord into a D shape but you let the G string ring out. Doesn’t this sound wrong when talking about a D chord? :slight_smile: Kind regards. Dirk

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@YokoDi G is the IV chord of the D Major scale

D chord + 4th => (I think) it would actually be a D add4 (not sus4 because the 3rd, F#, is also played)

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Dear,
Ok thank you for the information. Kind regards Dirk.

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If you use the “Big G” or open G5, you can get some useful sounds at the 6th, 8th and 10th fret. :slight_smile:

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@YokoDi and @qwerty1928
This needs amending slightly.

For analysis, you would describe the note G as the 4th scale degree of the D major scale (not the IV chord).

D major scale in two repeats.

The notes in the C-shape chord played with root at fret 5 of the A string are:
D, F#, G, D
or
D, F#, G, D, E if the high e string is allowed to sound.
Those are, viewed as:
1, 3, 4 = Dadd4
or
1, 3, 4, 9 = Dadd4add9

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“High And Dry” by Radiohead has this groovy F#m in it throughout the song. Combined with an Asus2 and E, plus the cool little intro riff consisting of octaves, makes for a killer song easy to play.

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Thank you for the clarification :slightly_smiling_face:

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The 2, 3, and 4 finger variations of the G chord all sound different if you experiment with them. I like the 4 finger (rock G or Noel Gallagher G) the most.

Perfect song for this grip is People Of The Sky by Sloan. You can use the grip at the 3rd, 5th, 8th and 10th fret. It sounds great! You can use the C shape for this song too.

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It becomes a Dadd11 (G the 11th), but what’s in a name. Plenty of songs where it is used that way. Check out Closer To Fine by The Indigo Girls: with capo on the 2nd fret there is a chord progression in the verse that goes from Dadd11/A to C/G (chord names relative to the capo). You could mute the G string I guess, but why?

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Moving the Em shape as you do here, and adding the first finger to replace the open string reminds me a lot of a few tunes by the band, “America”, as used on tunes like “Muskrat Love” and “Tin Man”. In fact I use those when I play those songs.

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I’ve been working on incorporating these moveable chords into my songs, so I made a video of The Fool On The Hill, which uses the A, A minor, E, and E minor (with added index finger) moveable chords, which sounds very very nice.

Don’t mind my horrible singing and I forgot a bunch of the words. I just made this video to show that you can incorporate these moveable chords into songs and that they sound very good and can be used to spice up a song that would normally use regular Major and minor chords.

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Thanks Justin - a truly brilliant lesson and to say something clicked is an understatement. Already had some great fun mixing up some tunes.

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I watched this lesson last year. Yesterday I wanted to find it, spent a lot of time searching for it with no result. Voila here is it :smiley: It is in my opinion of of Justin’s coolest lessons. He’s right about it being super useful for writing songs. Thankyou Ben for the bump and thankyou Justin.

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I like using the G shape position for two things. First Major Pentatonic licks and runs to try and sound like Hendrix, also see in the “Thinking Out Loud” solo. Seems to be a favorite place for a lot of country stuff. As a moveable shape, I like the 1st inversion quadad that has the 3d in the bass. This is the chord at the end of the Jack Johnson tune “Times Like these” Basically playing around with the triad shape is where all the good stuff is in the G position

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my brain hurts a bit trying to get my head around the chord names etc in this one. I feel like this is one of those concepts thats hard to give a series of practical examples without being so specific it looses the relevance as a concept.
Think with this one there is nothing much to do other than know these things exist and then get mucky with it when you are experimenting.

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How do you go about naming the chords (or working out what chord they are) when its a chordshape up the fretboard but you ditch the open root note) - eg E shape played on the 7th fret with no 6th string? So confused.

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In most cases these types of chords have more than one name. It depends on what chords are played with them or key the music is in. One way is to write out the notes of the chords and figure out how the fit in the scale of the key.
Two songs that come to mind using these types of chords are Melissa by the Allman Brothers and Baby I love Your Way by Peter Frampton.

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Please anyone correct me if I’m wrong in this but unless you want to get really bogged down in theory I don’t really feel it’s important right now.

I know the need to learn can become all consuming, but it’s the The whys will come with extended study well above where this lesson stands.

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White Unicorn by Wolfmother is a great song to practice movable D-chord shapes.

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Hi all. Justin mentions that there will be a list of songs that use the different shapes. I don’t see that in the text with the lesson or, scanning through the comments, in the discussion. Does anyone know if that list was ever compiled? I see a few song references here and there in the comments but with so much material in this lesson it would be massively useful to have a list of songs so that we aren’t spending all of our time just randomly experimenting with the chord shapes.

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